It was 69 years ago today that Winston Churchill gave one of the greatest speeches of the 20th century.

The speech has been much on my mind in the past year

I have, myself, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our Island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone. At any rate, that is what we are going to try to do. That is the resolve of His Majesty’s Government-every man of them. That is the will of Parliament and the nation. The British Empire and the French Republic, linked together in their cause and in their need, will defend to the death their native soil, aiding each other like good comrades to the utmost of their strength. Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.

Audio?  Sure!

No real blogging today.  I’ll be doing Memorial Day stuff.

Of course, the day exists to pay homage to the million-odd American servicemen who’ve died protecting this nation over the past two centuries and change.

It’ll be a while before I write a Memorial Day tribute I’m as happy with as the one I did two years ago, the tribute to 100-odd years of veterans from the various units of the North Dakota National Guard – the 164th Infantry Regiment from the Spanish-American War and both World Wars through Korea, the 957th Field Artillery, 188th Field Artillery and 776th Tank Destroyer Battalion in World War II, and, most recently the 141st Combat Engineers, and Jamestown’s 817th Engineer (Sapper) Company in Iraq.

Anyway, whoever your veterans are, it’s a great day to remember the sacrifices that kept this nation – and a good chunk of the rest of the world – free.

Today is the 104th anniversary of the Norske Revolusjon – when Norwegian patriots rebelled, casting off the brutal, authoritarian hand of the Swedish monarchy in an epic cataclysm that ended with a titanic battle in the hills outside Oslo, ending in a crushing Norwegian victory that sent the demoraized Swedes into a panicked retreat in the short term, and a social tailspin in the long run.

After the battle, and when the treaty was signed that granted Norway its hard=earned independence, General Olaf Haraldsson proclaimed:

Med allmektige Gud som vitne i dag, jeg sverger før du at fra i dag fram til slutten av tid og norsk skal noensinne baugen ned før en svenske. Det er bare galt

Words we cal all live by?  I think we can all agree on this.

So happy birthday, Norway!

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It was 30 years ago today that Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

Last week, I noted that some scolds on the left were tut-tutting about the “historical accuracy” of calling tax protests “Tea Parties”.

Being me, the English major, I noted that “language changes”.

Mark Steyn being Mark Steyn, he noted that they’re wrong; it is perfectly historically accurate (emphasis added):

OK, to be less absolutist about it, my interests include finding a road at the end of my drive every morning, and modern equipment for the (volunteer) fire department and a functioning military to deter the many predators out there, and maybe one or two other things. But 95 percent of the rest is not just “special interests” but social engineering – a $400 tax credit for falling into line with Barack Obama and Susan Roesgen. That’s why these are Tea Parties – because the heart of the matter is the same question posed two-and-a-third centuries ago: Are Americans subjects or citizens? If the latter, then a benign sovereign should not be determining “your interests” and then announcing that he’s giving you a “tax credit” as your pocket money.

He who forgets history probably votes Democrat anyway.

…that the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began.

The story is well-known to people who know their history – which means most Americans know nothing about it.

Before there were concentration and extermination camps, the Nazis used the traditional Jewish “Ghettos” of Eastern Europe as natural “camps” in which to confine the Jews, Gypsies and the rest of their targets. They systematically deported Jews from all over Poland, Ukraine and Russia – and then all over Europe – to these small enclaves in Polish, Baltic and Ukrainian cities, using them as holding tanks until the camps – the last link in the Final Solution – were ready.

And in early 1942, they were ready.  The Germans started shipping Jews off to Treblinka, the first of the Vernichtungslagern, or Extermination camps.

And in the overcrowded, starving, disease-ridden Warsaw Ghetto – the realization that the end was near provoked a response from some of the inmates; it’d be better to die fighting.

And so a resistance movement,armed with a few stolen handguns and rifles, had formed.  In the previous months, it had managed to disrupt some of the roundups to the camps, throwing the Germans’ plans – as precise as any industrial supply chain management system – into disarray. And on April 19, the Germans’ military response was met with armed resistance.

The story is long, and gruesome; it’s been told better elsewhere.

The Jews – hopelessly outnumbered and virtually unarmed by military standards – somehow dished out a military setback to the Germans, holding the Germans out of the Ghetto for nearly a month.

It couldn’t last, of course.  The Germans advanced building-to-building, killing nearly everyone as they went, burning the entire Ghetto to the ground.

The Germans trashed the Ghetto as thoroughly as Ground Zero; they shipped the very few they didn’t kill or burn or bury out of hand off to Treblinka (itself to end in another doomed uprising in the near future).

There are still some survivors; Marek Edelman, at 87, the last surviving leader, and a handful of others continue to tell their stories.  But like our own World War Two generation, the Holocaust’s few survivors – and the fewer still who survived the Ghetto – are dying off.
And as they do, we should worry – justifiably – that society is going to forget about what happened; that society might forget the consequences of racism (the real kind), hatred, dminishing the humanity of ones’ enemies (or scapegoats) to try to justify all manner of inhumanities and horrors upon them. And of course, worry that some will take away the wrong lesson, as another loathsome person did fourteen years ago today.

I read the story of the Ghetto and the Uprising when I was in junior high; I probably absorbed it much later.  And lessons were these; never let this happen here.  Call out the prejudice that leads to this sort of eliminationist hatred when you see it, and do it without stint or mercy.  Never let society be left at the mercy of the thugs and the autocrats; it’s why we have a Second Amendment.

Above all, uphold humanity.

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Ed and I will be interviewing Michael Yon tomorrow on the Northern Alliance Radio Network Volume 2, “The Headliners”.

Yon is currently America’s pre-eminent war corresondent.  He’s spent more time in Iraq and Afghanistan than most soldiers. He’s tackled everyone – the military, the Bush Administration, and even (in one notable incident in Mosul) the terrorists, at gunpoint.  Even Ernie Pyle never did that.

This is one of those interviews I’ve been looking forward to for years.

We’ll also be interviewing Eva Ng, candidate for mayor of Saint Paul.  She’s conservative,she’s a turnaround consultant (anyone know of a city that could use that?) and she’s been endorsed by the St. Paul City GOP Convention.  I’m looking forward to this.
I hope you can be there.

After eight years of dubbing non-Klansman John Ashcroft “AshKKKroft”, comparing emphatic non-Nazis George Bush, Dick Cheney and Arnold Scharzenegger to Hitler, Himmler and Heydrich, and calling every economic downturn on a Republican’s watch “The Worst Since The Depression (TM)”, some lefties have found accuracy they can believe in.

“Comparing the Tea Parites to the Boston Tea Party is historically inaccurate”, I’ve heard more than a few lefties insist. “They were protesting against taxation without representation”.

Well, true, as far as it goes.  Of course, the “Tea Party” idiom has grown over the centuries to mean – in regular conversation – any kind of blow against arrogant, wastrel authority, but no matter.  The interesting bit for me is “what did the forefathers of these suddently-accurate lefties do when it was their turn to strike a blow for strict, pointillistic accuracy?”

So I dug through the archives.

May 8, 1945, New York (AP): Bob DeGrasse is having nothing to do with “VE Day”.

“We haven’t defeated Europe”, DeGrasse emphasizes, nervously twisting the ends of his stylized van dyk beard. “we defeated Germany, which in German is called Deutschland.  This observance should be called “VD Day” or, to be completely accurate, Sieg Trotz Deutschland, or “STD”, Day.

“There really is no honest alternative”.

———-

January 31, 1999, Seattle (UPI) – As the world awaits the historic, and possibly fraught, switchover to the new millenium, many worry about possible terrorist strikes expanding on the confusion.

Phoebe Napolitino disagrees.

“The new Millennium”, she enounces carefully, “doesn’t begin until January 1, 2001”.  She perches her horn-rimmed glasses on her nose.  “By which I mean, the first of January, 2001, or New Years day of 2001”.

“Terrorists wont’ strike ’til then”.

———-

June 9, 1933, Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine (Tass) – Dmitri Holodomoriuk has had it up to here with Soviet prosecutors.

“All these people being taking away for “right-wing activity”, Holodomoriuk muttered under his breath “are mostly just peasants who never had a political thought in their…”

Holodomoriuk’s sentence was intewrrupted by being grabbed and thrown into a Black Maria, never to be seen again.

Peoples’ Commissariat spokeswoman Zhanina Napolitanska has not returned comment.

History shows the importance of accuracy.

…where “Well-Regulated” means “can hit what they shoot at”, and “militia” means “civilians with guns”, can have an incredible impact on the world when they need to.

It was 69 years ago today, during Germany’s invasion of Norway, that an ad-hoc group of Norwegian soldiers and armed civilians repelled a German attempt to capture King Haakon VII and his cabinet.

King Haakon VII and Prince Olaf

Germany invaded Norway by surprise.  Norway’s policy at the time was absolute neutrality – in other words, belief that all belligerents were equally wrong – which led them to hold that the British, French and Poles were just as wrong as the Germans for World War II.  It’s a footnote in history that they were, for their own purposes, basically right; as the German invasion force sailed and flew toward Norway, a British force was also moving to try to seize Narvik, as the jumping-off point of a campaign to cut off Swedish steel supplies from the German war machine.  Events changed the British invasion force into group of timely reinforcements.

Norway, being officially pacifist both as a practical matter (it’s a small country stuck between military giants) and a political one (they were controlled by a socialist government), had only very recently decided to modernize its military.

Norwegian soldiers, 1940

Its navy’s small destroyer and torpedo boat fleets had been built in the 1910s at the latest; it’s two “battleships”, really nothing more than harbor guard ships, were antiques from the 1890’s.

Torpedo boat HNoMS Kjell, built in the 1890s, still in service in 1940

Coastal defense “Battleship” HNoMS Eidsvold, blown up and sunk in the opening moments of the war after being torpedoed by surprise, with a loss of all but six of its crew of 181. 

The Germans went straight for the Norwegian jugular, attempting the contemporary equivalent of a “shock and awe” campaign.

Narvik on fire

Fallschirmjäger (paratroops) landed at key spots around Oslo, seizing key government installations; ships with German troops landed out of the blue at others.  One of them – the heavy cruiser Blücher, loaded with a battalion of German troops – went barrelling up Oslo fjord.  I’ts mission was to land the troops at the head of the fjord, cutting the only real road out of Oslo to the interior, preventing King Haakon and his government’s escape on the chance that the paratroopers missed him.

Germans advancing in Norway, 1940

And it was there, and only there, that Norway’s formal defenses worked; an antique, 40-year-old torpedo, fired from a tube at the Oscarsborg fortress, sank Blücher, killing hundreds and preventing the rest of the invasion fleet from blocking Haakon’s escape route.

KMS Blücher blazes as it sinks

Haakon and his cabinet escaped into Norway’s interior, to lead a motley collection of troops from Norway’s tiny army, and thousands of “reservists” who were, truth be told, mostly members of outdoors and hunting clubs.

It’s there we pick up our story.

With Haakon’s escape, the German command detailed a raid to try to capture him.

A detachment of Germans Fallschirmjäger, the elite of the German military at the time, trained and armed with the best the Wehrmacht [*] had, launched what we’d call a “commando raid” today (the term “commando” wouldn’t be introduced to these types of troops for another year or so).  They drove off into the interior…

…and smacked into a Norwegian roadblock at Midtskogen Gård, near Elverum.

Norwegian troops, 1940

The Norwegians – a company of Norwegian royal guards, reinforced by a bunch of rifle club members armed only with antique-y Krag-Jørgensson rifles and hunting pieces, kicked Nazi ass, killing two Germans (one of whom had been the German military attache to Norway before the Nazi treachery unfolded and he took his place as an officer) for a loss of three wounded Norwegians. Rumors that anyone yelled “Wølverijne” while shooting at the Germans are completely unconfirmed.

“The founding fathers were writing about muskets when they wrote the Constitution!” Norwegian citizen-soldier, armed with the “assault rifle” of the day, takes aim at an invader.

Most importantly, the Germans realized the motley collection of Oles and Svens had delayed them to the point where King and Cabinet had escaped; the Germans retreated to Oslo, and King Haakon got away to the UK, where he led Norwegians in exile against the Germans for the next five years.

And so while the militia couldn’t defeat the Nazi war machine outright, it did give it a bloody enough nose to give Norway – and freedom – a chance to fight another day.

The rear guard; Norwegian and British soldiers in the interior, 1940

Further proof, were any needed, that Liberals are wrong.

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…my true love gave to me:

Twelve gorgeous mornings, eleven deranged liberals, ten panicked Kremlins, nine hot economies, eight imprisoned Cubans, seven Pershing missiles, six tired chimpanzees,

Five torn-down Berlin walls!

Four epic tax cuts, three cheesed-off commies, two times for choosing, and a shining city on a hill!

It is, of course, Reagan’s Birthday today.

Were he alive, the greatest president of my lifetime, and by far the best of the last half of the Twentieth Century, would be 98 years old today.

I’ve been writing about Reagan – who, along with PJ O’Rourke, Solzhenitzyn, Dostoevskii and Paul Johnson is the reason I’m a conservative today – as long as this blog has been in existence.  His eight years were not perfect, and I’ll resist the urge to beatify my presidents, even if they’ve been out of office for twenty years (to say nothing of in their first month of service).  His last term wasn’t as stellar as his first, and his last two years were very difficult.

Still and all, he was the greatest president of the second half of the 20th Century.  And it’s gotten to the point where his former opponents know it, because they’re paying him the ultimate compliment; they’re trying to co-opt his legacy.  Obama the communicator is compared, favorably (and wishfully) to…Reagan.  And even Hollywood is in on the act, having tried to filch Reagan’s victory in the Cold War, carefully trim context to fit their narrative, and hand it to a Democrat.

Fortunately, the people freed by the end of the Cold War know better.  Hollywood makes movies; the Poles and Georgians and Czechs make statues.
But in these difficult times, when a President is promoting fear and malaise in the guise of “change” and “doing something”, it’s worth remembering Reagan’s example; when times seemed at their most dire (and 1980 was a lot worse than 2008), Reagan walked onto the scene with a smile and a vision, and a backbone of steel, and cleaned up the mess lefty by his failed slapnut predecessor – something our next president will need in 2012 or 2016.

And the most important part?  He did it by unleashing something that many, then as now, thought was dead – the inner, optimistic, take-charge greatness of the American spirit.

Reagan’s gone.  But that spirit, the one he understood, almost alone among American politicans of his era, lives on in the American people.  Most of it, anyway.

NOTE:  While this blog encourages a bumptious, raucous debate, this post is a pro-Reagan zone.  All comments deemed critical of Reagan will be expunged without ceremony.  You’ve been warned.

You have the whole rest of the media to play about in; this post is gonna be gloriously monochrome.

…my true love gave to me:

Eleven deranged liberals, ten panicked Kremlins, nine hot economies, eight imprisoned Cubans, seven Pershing missiles, six tired chimpanzees,

Five torn-down Berlin walls!

Four epic tax cuts, three cheesed-off commies, two times for choosing, and a shining city on a hill!

…my true love gave to me:

Ten panicked Kremlins, nine hot economies, eight imprisoned Cubans, seven Pershing missiles, six tired chimpanzees,

Five torn-down Berlin walls!

Four epic tax cuts, three cheesed-off commies, two times for choosing, and a shining city on a hill!

http://www.slate.com/id/2102081/

…my true love gave to me:

Nine hot economies, eight imprisoned Cubans, seven Pershing missiles, six tired chimpanzees,

Five torn-down Berlin walls!

Four epic tax cuts, three cheesed-off commies, two times for choosing, and a shining city on a hill!

…my true love gave to me:

Eight imprisoned Cubans, seven Pershing missiles, six tired chimpanzees,

Five torn-down Berlin walls!

Four epic tax cuts, three cheesed-off commies, two times for choosing, and a shining city on a hill!

…my true love gave to me:

Seven Pershing missiles, six tired chimpanzees,

Five torn-down Berlin walls!

Four epic tax cuts, three cheesed-off commies, two times for choosing, and a shining city on a hill!

…my true love gave to me:

Six tired chimpanzees,
Five torn-down Berlin walls!

Four epic tax cuts, three cheesed-off commies, two times for choosing, and a shining city on a hill!

…my true love gave to me:

Five torn-down Berlin walls!

Four epic tax cuts, three cheesed-off commies, two times for choosing, and a shining city on a hill!

…my true love gave to me:  four epic tax cuts, three cheesed-off commies, two times for choosing, and a shining city on a hill!

…my true love gave to me: three cheesed-off commies, two times for choosing, and a shining city on a hill!

…my true love gave to me:

Two times for choosing, and a shining city on a hill!

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…my true love gave me me, a shining city on a hill!

(That’s right – 12 shopping days until Reagan’s Birthday – the official holiday of Shot In The Dark) (more…)

…I wish President Obama all the best.  It would be a great thing for this country if he were not a resounding flop.

As a pragmatist who pays attention to history?  I think Obama, with his gigantistic statist ambitions and “vote present” mentality, has the potential to be the worst, weakest, most disastrous president of my cognitive lifetime.  And that’s if his more authoritarian notions – the permanent compaign, the clamping down on freedom of speech – don’t come to pass.

For today, I’ll focus on the former.  Good luck, Mr. President.  Unlike some of your more deranged fans’ behavior over the past eight years, my fellow conservatives and I are a loyal opposition.

But we are watching.  You get no more free passes.  And while conservatism’s been on the ropes for the past four years, we’re in much better shape for a comeback than, say 35 years ago.  Another Gingrich Revolution awaits you in two years if you’re not a whole lot smarter than your administration seems to be starting out.

At any rate, good luck and God Bless America.

I started writing an autobiography once. I figured, “what better way to get out of a financial hole than to tell my thrilling story to the masses”.

I got to about chapter 27, when I realized my story – growing up in a middle-class home in North Dakota, moving to Minneapolis after college, going through a few careers – might
need a little “punching up” to really crack the big market and get optioned as a script.

So with the help of my agent, I’ve been working on it.

My agent once pondered over lunch “How lucky must those dang Holocaust survivors be? I mean, sure, losing their whole families sucks, but holy cow, there’s a story that doesn’t need anything to punch up the drama! I mean, zowie – every Holocaust survivor has a story that’ll get on the Oprah book club!”

I thought about what he said, while reading this story, about a Holocaust survivor who did feel the need to gussy up his story:

On Saturday, Berkley Books canceled Rosenblat’s memoir, “Angel at the Fence.” Rosenblat acknowledged that he and his wife did not meet, as they had said for years, at a sub-camp of Buchenwald, where she allegedly sneaked him apples and bread. The book was supposed to come out in February.

Rosenblat, 79, has been married to the former Roma Radzicky for 50 years, since meeting her on a blind date in New York. In a statement issued Saturday through his agent, he described himself as an advocate of love and tolerance who falsified his past to better spread his message.

“I wanted to bring happiness to people,” said Rosenblat, who now lives in the Miami area. “I brought hope to a lot of people. My motivation was to make good in this world.”

And he did.

Where “good” is defined as “splattering egg on Oprah’s face“.

Beyond that? Not so good.

Okay, so maybe we’re not going into another Great Depression. Maybe That 70’s Show offers us a better glimpse.

Actually, the year that offers the closest historical parallels to the present might be neither 1932 nor 1980 but 1976, and that analogy helps us understand the directions in which the country will be moving. Both in government and opposition, people might want to hold off on planning for the next New Deal, still less for a coming generation of liberal hegemony. In three or four years, the main political fact in this country could well be a ruinous crisis of Democratic liberalism.

The parallels are amusing if not cause for concern.

So disaffected was bicentennial America that it sought leaders unconnected to the establishment. In Jimmy Carter, voters found a candidate whose main qualifications were his lack of experience and connections within the Beltway or corporate worlds. Like Barack Obama, Carter claimed to rise above failed partisanship, while his New South background allowed him to symbolize racial healing. Carter, like Obama, sold himself mainly on the virtues of his character. He presented himself as a man of simple honesty, faith, and decency, and his lack of a track record allowed voters to see in him what they wanted, however far-fetched those hopes might be. If they hadn’t believed it, they wouldn’t have seen it with their own eyes. Above all, Carter promised change, a message that carried weight as long as its details remained nonspecific. The problem with messiahs from nowhere is that when they do exercise power, people discover to their horror what their leader’s actual views and talents are. The disillusion can be dreadful.

Gulp.

And as they did in 1976, Democrats now show every sign of repeating the blunders that led to a generation-long discrediting of liberalism.

Hee hee hee.

But if liberals seem so determined to repeat the mistakes of that era, then we have at least a plausible sketch of the coming Obama administration—of its rise and ruin.

Obama may have been right. They are the people we’ve been waiting for…

…to illustrate to those that weren’t paying attention: what happens when Liberals have the helm.